The Takeaway Rembrandt

Today #Trevors, we head to Dulwich, an affluent part of south London where the crime also tends to have a bit of a "posh" edge to it! Hannah walks us through the story of the takeaway Rembrandt, a small painting by an old master that has been stolen more times than any other! 

So today's episode is more Oceans Eleven, than Seven but no less interesting! Think heists, capers and a dodgy man in the backroom of a Barclays bank!

Plus the usual nonsense including unidentified bangs in the night and the start of a war over "Aunty Hannah". 

Transcript

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Ep 14 - Stolen Rembrandt - Dulwich Picture Gallery

Hello, I'm Rachel. I'm Hannah. And this is the Sinister South podcast, a podcast based in South London, our home, which we love, but that talks about things that we don't.

It works. It works. I'm just trying to change it up a bit.

How are you? I haven't said nefarious in a while. Maybe we can do that next time. I've done it before.

Put it on the radar. Yeah, exactly. Why not? How are you? I'm all right.

I'm tired. I was going to say, how is being no longer fun employed? Rubbish. Rubbish.

I'm knackered. I'm just brain dead. It's like new information, lots of it, new faces, new personalities to work out.

New everything. But everyone has been genuinely lovely so far. They seem like a really solid bunch.

A bit nerdy, but that's my bag in friends, isn't it? Well, exactly. Yeah, nerdy in a good way. They're all really passionate about what they do, which I'm still trying to work that out.

Literally, that's where my brain's at. Computing everything I need to learn. It is always the way, isn't it? I don't know why.

I always just assumed that when you become an adult, right? Admittedly, we are still far from it. But when you become an adult, you sort of assume that you'll just get used to shit like starting a new job. At school, when you started a new school year and your parents would go, oh, you're going to sleep well tonight.

It's going to really hit you. That first week back is a bit knackering. And you kind of assume that that's going to get easier.

And it doesn't. It doesn't. Never.

And it's just learning, isn't it? Everyone's got different terminology for the same thing, and it's just trying to translate what they mean and kind of how. Also, it's me. So I try to work out when is appropriate to make jokes.

Is this, you know, am I going to get in trouble or is this OK? Still gauging everybody's tolerance of things. And like having quite a few trusty gut moments. That's good, though.

So I really I'm not complaining at all. I'm just tired. But I've been.

I was going to say I've been bed hopping, but that sounds terrible. But I've been staying. I stayed at my mom's.

They're on holiday. And so my brother and sister are house sitting, dog sitting. So I've been popping in to stay with them, see Ted the dog.

And it's just been like, oh, I'm in this bed. Oh, now I'm at home again. Oh, now I'm here again.

And then the three of us kind of revert back to. Well, we're just two children that live together in it. Which has been fun.

Oh, nice. Yeah, I'm a bit like I'm very pleased to have my mom come home from holiday. Yes.

Yeah. I'm very looking forward to spending some time with her. It feels like she's been gone months.

It does feel like she's been gone a long time. Three weeks. It feels like it's been months.

And then obviously, in a couple of weeks, we've got Ireland. So I'm really looking forward to spending time with her and all of that. So it's lovely that she's back.

But at the same time, I'm like, I got really sad leaving my brother and sister earlier. I was like, I don't want to go back to reality. I want to live here with you two in a big house where we just live together.

Yeah. And Jamie pays for everything. I mean, can I join in? Can I be a fourth sibling you never knew you needed? But it's been lovely.

We did a film night where all three of us kind of bundled together on one sofa watching films and the dog was around, the cat was around even, and all of that. So it was really, really fun. We've been having a few drinks over dinner and chatting and debating stuff.

I end up with those two end up having conversations about things that I would never normally have conversations. You know, one's a neuroscientist and one's whatever Jamie does, try and explain that. Something that requires... Really important and complicated.

That requires a brain that only Jamie has. Yeah, like something very complicated on a computer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Enterprise. Words like that. Python.

But like, so we end up kind of, even if we're talking about gossiping about people or like whatever, it then ends up in this like, is that a moral quandary? Is this an ethical dilemma? And like, we end up having these quite big conversations, but it's fun. Yeah. And I get to just be the idiot that's like, I don't know.

What do you think? I'm silly. But yeah, so I genuinely got really sad that it was like, that's done for a little while. But I honestly have had a lovely few weeks.

Yeah. Well, we've been coming to annoy you at your mum's house quite a bit. Yes, indeedy.

The chiblings have been around. It's been very sweet. Which has been lovely.

Although I am going to put out there that my oldest, when we had some other friends, small people, come to your mum's house for an evening. And one of them said, can we call you Auntie Hannah? And she said nothing. And then... I said yes.

You said yes. I said nothing. And I didn't look them in the eye.

Did not look them in the eye. How very dare you. I'm not even going to dignify it with a response.

It was an honour. I said yes. Yes, she said yes.

And then my oldest said nothing at the time, bit her tongue. And then we were on the way home. And she turned around to me in the car and she went, so them calling her Auntie Hannah.

When's that stopping? I was like, do you not want to show your Auntie Hannah? And she was like, no. I am a fair and inclusive auntie. Auntie to many, mother to none.

How it works for me. I know, I just feel like you may end up with, there's going to be some sort of carnage that happens. Some beef.

There will be some beef. Children related beef. But yeah, it's been really nice.

And it's been lovely to see your brother and sister, albeit briefly. Yeah, they don't really get involved when the kids are there. Which is fair, which is entirely fair.

I've got one less kid at the moment. I know. It's very quiet in this house.

I know. It's really weird. It is really odd.

And I don't know that I like it. So the youngest has gone off on her holidays a little bit earlier. She's having a week with Will's mum down in Devon.

And it's just the two of them. They got there yesterday. And today she's been on the beach and she's made new friends.

And she's bought some bright yellow Crocs, which are a statement. And she's having a lovely time and running around living her best free range six year old life, which is very sweet and very lovely. But she calls me and she's still got her, like, she's got this really wobbly front tooth at the minute and just refuses to come out.

So it makes her smile all crooked because it's so wobbly. But it's just it's hanging on with every ounce of its being. So she's got this stupid little smile at the minute and she calls and she's just like, Hiya! It's a stupid little smile.

And I'm just like, Hello! How's it going babe? It's just not here. So yeah, that's been fun. Oh bless you.

But she's having a wonderful time. Yes. And I will be reunited with her soon, which will be good.

And then I get her back home for a week and the big one stays in Devon for a week. So I think it's really nice for you guys to have one on one time. Yeah.

With each child as well. Yeah, it is. It's fun.

You get to do things that are a little bit more catered to them rather than trying to figure out what makes everybody happy. Yeah, because the short answer is, mate, nothing, nothing. But no, so that's all been fun.

I can't please all of the people all of the time. You cannot. But there we go.

I was trying to think we were talking at the start about what we could talk about, because yet again, we've done that thing where we're like, actually, we've seen each other quite a bit. What have we got new to say to each other? Well, it's not even that. It's just everything we've been doing is either like, OK, we've been swimming and being silly with the kids or working.

Working, exactly. Not good podcast fodder. Not good podcast fodder.

Absolutely not. But I was telling you about a bit of a weird moment. I had to say, shut up! We can do this on the pod! Shut up! Record! Press record! I was in the bath on Friday, minding my own business, after dealing with the fact that the door to my toilet was very broken.

Oh, dear. Did you not see it? Did you not go upstairs? No, I went downstairs. All right, Rachel Toulouse.

Rachel Toulouse. The upstairs one, little one got angry and it don't work no more. Oh, that's lovely for everyone.

Exactly. So I need to get Will to fix the toilet door. But anyway, I was in the bathroom after that, decompressing and de-stressing after I'd got her to bed and she'd calmed down and we'd surveyed the damage and gone, we'll deal with that at some point.

And I was lying in the bath, minding my own business, and suddenly all I heard was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then nothing. And I can't work out, right? And I'm going to put it out here.

Next door has failed me. Oh, the next door app? The next door app. Like your neighbours? My neighbours have failed me.

There have been no more cinnamon buns. I'm just putting it out there. No, next door the app has failed me.

The BBC failed me, like even local BBC stuff. News shopper, nothing. Trying to find out what the hell this was, whether it was just some random rogue fireworks.

Like a box of fireworks. Yeah, it's just gone off for some reason, wherever. Or whether it was some sort of shooting incident.

Can't find anything. Absolutely nothing. To the point where now... Which makes me think it's probably fireworks rather than... I think if there had been rapid gunfire.

Yes. And I'm not hoping for rapid gunfire. I just think our algorithms being what they are because of doing this.

Yeah, true. I think we would know before the gun even went off. More than likely.

The news shopper would be like, hey, hey, hey, raise your hand, raise your hand, raise your hand. Um, but yeah, no, but it was just really weird because it was like there wasn't even... You know when you have a firework display, like even if it is like one that people are doing at home, there is usually like a few and then there's a little bit of a break and then there's another few and this was just as if an entire box had been set off at the same time and then that was... Maybe someone just fucked up. Maybe.

Maybe it was meant to be a lovely display for someone's birthday or something and they've just gone... Oh crap. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Well, that was that enjoyed.

They did that at... Was it not New Year's? Was it bonfire night last year? There was somewhere near here. Was it Greenwich? All their fireworks went off at once. I do vaguely remember something about this now.

Yeah, so maybe it was that. It was just very bizarre. I was just sort of like, and I must admit it did ruin the atmosphere of my relaxing bath when I was suddenly immediately like, right, must find out what that was.

But yeah, never did find out. So if anyone knows, if anyone either let off a load of fireworks or shot anyone... Yeah, do get in touch. Just let us know.

Reach out. That'd be great. Thanks.

Could everybody stop getting shot? But yeah, it was just a bit odd. And I was then waiting for the, like, the Neenahs, but I didn't hear any of them either. So it probably was just fireworks, but just bizarre.

So there you go, my random bit of talking nonsense at you. Lovely. Awfully lovely.

Do you want to do the nice bits? Oh, go on then. And this is the point where I'm going to fuck up the website again. Come on.

It is. If you would like to come and talk to us, we are all over the place. You can come and chat to us on our website, which is SinisterSouthPod.co.uk. I did it, guys.

And then if you would like to send us an email, it is SinisterSouthPodcast at gmail.com. And you can find us on Instagram and TikTok, both are Sinister South Pod. Or you can come and find our more personal accounts, which are Rach.andHan.SinisterSouth. Occasionally I get drunk and just post random screenshots of messages that we've sent to each other. You do.

And it does make me happy. This will be really funny for the Trevors. You need a fringe, don't get a fringe.

Yeah, so you can come and see all of that. And we've got the Facebook group, which is Trevors Unite, run by the ever so lovely Lou. And then there's the Patreon, which Les said about better.

Patreon.com forward slash Sinister South. And I do have still got to do the fucking badges. I've put them all on the cards now.

I've got the envelopes. Just need to do the addresses. So good.

I'm just, I'm just saying, put it out there. I'll pop it in your diary. Thanks.

Thanks. So it's just what I need. Listen, if there's one thing about me is consistency.

Yes. I said you were making a road for your own back. I said, you will cross that bridge when you get to it.

And I said, that's your bed you're making. I know you'd be prepared to lie in it. However, you did also say, admittedly, after a few beers, you did also say, right, what we'll do is next time I come around, we will sit there together and we'll write out the envelopes.

You had had a beer. Have you got any envelopes? Yeah, I've got envelopes. Just do it then.

Okay, we'll do that then. Fucking do it then. Fine.

Stop recording and do it now. No, let's not do that. Also to say, Trev, we are coming up to our annual couple of weeks off.

Summer holiday. Which will be, we've decided, I think it's not obviously not this one because this is going out. You'll have one more and then we're having two weeks off.

So that's just to keep you informed. And I will try very, very hard to make sure that this episode. Well, if it's not, it's too late.

But I'm trying to make sure that they will actually go out at 8am like they're supposed to and not 20 past two. When we look at each other and go, shit. Or when you message me going, is there meant to be a podcast? I sent you a message in that text like, do you need help with the podcast? I'm not going to do it, but do you need any help? That's my polite way of saying, right, point your fucking finger out.

I was moving like, I've just got to my mum's and then I've got to do this and then I'll have like that. Rods, bats, yours, not mine. Fine.

Well, if that's I've made my rod, you've made yours today. You've got a story to tell me. I do.

Are you ready? Just about. I reckon I've got my my alcohol free fetches. Alcohol free.

Alcohol free. Because apparently I do not need alcohol to sound ridiculous. So there we go.

I don't think that there are particularly any trigger warnings. This week. I feel like the world is heavy.

Yes. I don't need to be. Fair.

I like that. But we'll see. I can't really remember.

I wrote this ages ago. Full disclosure. I wrote this a really long time ago on the understanding that I would, it would be like the nuclear option.

I would pull this one out when I knew Rachel needed cheering up because she was so desperate for me to do it. I was so vehemently against doing it because there's nothing to fucking talk about. No one even died.

I didn't want to do it. But I wrote it kind of in spite and love. Fair.

Being like, I'll fucking show her. I'll fucking write it and show her. And then I'll sit on it until she's sad.

And then I know it will make her happy. Oh, I love you. Here's a story for Rachel and her very stressful week.

Thank you very much. It's a Wednesday night in November of 2019. And it's late.

Getting on for about half past 11. Dulwich Picture Gallery is shut, dark, locked up for the night. Inside, hanging on the walls, is one of the biggest Rembrandt exhibitions the country had seen in years.

35 works. Paintings, etchings, drawings. Some of them theirs.

Some of them flown in on loan from Paris and Amsterdam. The kind of show where the insurance paperwork alone probably needs its own room. Yeah, fair.

And a man breaks in. He gets himself inside, into the exhibition, and he goes straight for the walls. Takes down two Rembrandts, actual Rembrandts, off of the wall.

In his hands. And for about 30 seconds, this man is having the night of his life. He has just walked into England's oldest public art gallery and helped himself to two old masters like his nip around the co-op.

And then the alarm goes off. Because of course it does. Of course it does.

And the police are quick. They're in there within minutes. They come into the grounds and they find him still on the property and they challenge him.

This man, cornered, holding two priceless paintings, does not drop them and put his hands up. He pulls out a canister. We still don't know exactly what was in it.

And he sprays a police officer full in the face with it. Oh God. Terrifying.

Yeah. And in the confusion and the melee, he legs it and he gets clean away. He has never been caught to this day.

But here's the thing. He didn't take the paintings with him. Somewhere in all that panic, he ditched them.

And the next morning, two Rembrandts worth an eye-watering amount of money are found dumped outside in the gallery grounds, face down in wet, muddy undergrowth, like a couple of bin bags that missed the collection. Oh no. The detective who ran it was from the Flying Squad, the proper old-school armed robbery lot.

And he called it, quote, an audacious attempted burglary clearly planned in advance. Which, I mean, yeah. Right up until the part where you mace a copper and drop the loot in a flower bed.

So that's a mad enough story on its own. But here's what makes it the perfect way into today's episode. Because Dulwich Picture Gallery is home to the single most stolen painting in the world.

It's in the Guinness Book of Records for it. A little Rembrandt that has been nicked and nicked and nicked again. And on that night in 2019, with a man literally pulling Rembrandts off the walls, that painting wasn't even in that room.

It wasn't in the exhibition. He went to all that trouble and he didn't even go for the famous one. So today we're going to talk about that famous one.

This is the story of The Takeaway Rembrandt. I love it. I'm so excited.

Okay, so let's meet it. Because I want you to be able to picture the picture. Yes, fair.

The painting is a portrait. It's a young man, dark hair down to about his jawline, little moustache, wearing a black coat with a big white collar, looking slightly to one side against a plain background. And it's small.

That's the first thing. It's around 30 centimetres by 25. Call it 12 inches by 10, if that's your metric.

Smaller than a lot of the framed photos people have on their mantelpieces. You could tuck it comfortably under one arm. Hold on to that thought, because that detail is basically the whole episode.

It was painted by Rembrandt in 1632, and the young man in it is real. His name was, excuse me, Jacob de Gein III, or Jacob de Gein III, or Jacob de Gein III. I don't know how to pronounce it.

You scratch and sniff whichever one you like. He was a Dutch engraver, an artist himself, living in Utrecht. Not, by the way, a cardinal, which is the thing you'll see claimed in one or two places about him.

Right. Somewhere along the line, a newspaper got its wires crossed and promoted the poor man to cardinal. And that's just not true.

He was an engraver. That's it. And there's a genuinely lovely story attached to this painting, which I want to tell you, because it makes what happens later feel that bit more undignified.

Jacob had a best friend, a man called Maritz Hugen. Okay. And the two of them went to Rembrandt together and commissioned him to paint their portraits as a matching pair.

Sounds like something we would do. It definitely does sound like something we would do. Same size, same style, painted on two panels of oak, cut from the same piece of wood.

Little companion pictures of two best mates. And they made a pact, whichever one of them died first, the other one would keep both paintings so that the two friends would always stay together. Oh, that's very sweet.

And it happened. Jacob died first in 1641 and the portraits were reunited on Maritz's wall, exactly as they'd planned. And then Maritz died less than a year later.

And after that, over the centuries, the pair got split up, sold and sold again, drifting apart at auction until they ended up in different countries. Jacob came to Dulwich and his friend Maritz is in a gallery in Hamburg. Two portraits painted to stay together that haven't hung side by side in a very, very long time.

That's really sad. So that's the little painting. Small, portable, quietly sad backstory made by one of the most famous artists who has ever lived.

It arrives at Dulwich in the early 1800s as part of the founding collection and it hangs there completely undisturbed, minding its own business for about 150 years. Nice. And then 1966 happens.

It's New Year's Eve, 1966, the very early hours tipping over into New Year's Day and a team of thieves turn up at Dulwich Picture Gallery in the dark with a plan and a drill. Now, the gallery in the 60s was not exactly Fort Knox. There was an alarm, but it was only really wired up around the main doors, the entrances and exits, the ways you'd expect someone to come in.

So the thieves simply didn't use those. There was a small door tucked away that hardly ever got used and they got to work on it and drilled out one of the panels, knocked a section clean out of it and made themselves a little hatch to climb through, completely bypassing the alarm system. Nobody's phone rang, no big bell went off, nobody knew a thing.

The catch was that the hole they'd made was small, so they couldn't just grab anything. They were very limited to what they could physically fit back out through the gap. So they could only take small paintings, things that they could get out of their frames so that they could roll them up.

So that's what they took. And even with that limitation, they walked out there that night with eight paintings. And not eight of just anything, there were three Rembrandts, including the Jacob and one called Girl at a Window that is one of the gallery's absolute treasures.

They got away with three Rubens, a Gerrit Nou and Adam Eisenmeier, eight old masters out the door in one night. That is fairly impressive. Unlike my pronunciation of any of this.

You're doing fine, mate. At the time, and I want you to sit with the scale of this, it was the biggest art theft that had ever happened. Oh, wow.

Anywhere in the world. Okay. The value they put on it was north of three million pounds.

And remember, that's in 1966 money. And here's the first little grace note of this whole saga. Against that three million pounds of the world's finest art.

The gallery offered a reward for its return of 1000 pounds. Oh, a grand for the biggest artist art heist in history. I don't know what I love more.

The cheek of the thieves or the sheer thrift of the gallery. I mean, yeah. And I'm going to say where it's placed in Dulwich as well.

People around there have got a pretty penny. Eight old masters have gone. And you're like 1000 pounds.

We'll give you 1000 pounds if you hand them back. I'll give you a fiver. Give you a fiver and I won't tell your mum.

But this is the pattern that we're going to see again and again in this episode. Is that it didn't stay missing for long. Okay.

Within a few days, the whole lot was recovered. The man who ran the investigation was a detective superintendent called Charles Hewitt. And he's got a nice bit of trivia attached to him himself.

He'd previously worked the case of Dr. John Bodkin Adams, the GP suspected of being a serial killer, bumping off his elderly patients. So this is a heavy hitter detective on the case. And a tip off comes in.

And the paintings start turning up. Five of them are found wrapped in brown paper shoved under a bush upon Streatham Common in the gardens that they call the rookery. Just left there.

Oh. And the other three, including two of the Rembrandts, are found at a house on Knights Hill belonging to one of the thieves. Oh, good.

Because they had caught one. Just the one. But they caught him.

Fine. His name was Michael Hall, and he was 32. And he was an out of work ambulance driver.

Michael is, honestly, the most interesting person in this entire story. So I'm going to stay with him for a minute, because he does not do what you would expect. Okay.

So two of the paintings, the girl at the window and another Rembrandt, had been cut out of their frames with a knife. And it came out that Hall had bought that knife, especially for the job. So this wasn't a spur of the moment thing.

He'd catered the gallery beforehand, gone in more than once, worked out what he wanted and how to get there and get in. And he went to prison for it. He did five years, sentenced at the Old Bailey.

And here's the first surprising thing about Michael. He never gave up a single one of the others. Oh, wow.

Okay. He took five whole years and never named a single name. I mean, there is honour amongst thieves.

Now, years later, Hall did talk about why he did it. And I have to give you his versions, his version with both hands slightly raised. Okay.

Because it is his account, and there's no way to check most of it, right? Okay, fine. But he said that the job was done to order. That seven of the eight paintings were wanted by a Polish couple who'd offered £100,000 for each of them.

And that little, the Jacob painting specifically, had a separate buyer, an English collector, who was, quote, mad for Rembrandts. Okay. Who'd offered £30,000 for just that one.

Okay. By the time he was telling this story, he said the Polish couple had vanished and the English collector had emigrated to Australia. So make of that what you will.

Okay. Very convenient for every single person who could confirm it had quite conveniently disappeared to the other side of the planet. Yes, excellent.

But here's another. After Hall got out of prison in 1970, he went back to the gallery, not to rob again, but to help them. He gave them security advice.

He told them, look, you need to put tripwires on the back of the paintings, wire them into an alarm system. Here's how someone like me gets in and here's how you stop them. I mean, I kind of love it.

He was literally a security consultant for the gallery he robbed. I love that. And the gallery, and you will not believe this, except that by the end of today, you absolutely will believe this, just did not take his advice.

They said, thanks very much. And they gave him, as a thank you, a reproduction of one of the paintings that he'd stolen. It was a reproduction of the girl at the window.

And he took it home and hung it up proudly in his flat. And they did not put tripwires on anything. OK.

Because Jacob is about to be stolen three more times. And every single one of them is a security failure that Michael Hall had told them about for free in 1970. Oh, good.

Good, good. Just to finish off with Michael. Yeah.

Not how I'd written that here. Just to finish him off. Oh, Michael, I'm going to finish him off, is what I've written.

Oh, just to finish about Michael. He did go back to crime. OK.

He got caught red handed and did another seven years. But by 1981, he was telling a local paper that he'd packed it all in and gone straight and was working as a security guard at King's Cross, giving his spare time to age concern. OK.

So from biggest art heist in history to helping out old folks in King's Cross. I hope it's true. Yeah.

I really do. Oh, Lord. Right.

Theft number two for Jacob. 1973. And after all that, the drills, the special knife, the Polish couple, the international intrigue.

Theft number two is so stupid, it's almost beautiful. This is a palette cleanser. Because the gallery, having been given detailed security advice by an actual professional art thief, had done, say it with me, nothing.

The paintings still weren't alarmed. They just hung on the wall. Anyone could walk up to them.

So a man walked up to one. In broad daylight, with the gallery open, other people milling about, he strolled over to the, what was at this time, the second most stolen picture in the world. OK.

He walked up to the Rembrandt in the building, lifted it off the wall, tucked it away and walked straight back out of the front door. That was it. That was the whole heist.

Oh, my God. He just took it and he left. OK, cool.

Cool. And then he was caught almost immediately because his getaway, his getaway was a bicycle. He was pedalling off down the road with a stolen Rembrandt when they caught up to him.

A grown man on a pushbike with one of the most valuable small paintings on earth in the basket. Recovered, unharmed, back on the wall. That's fucking mental.

Now, there is a bit of a story that floats around about this one. When they nicked him and asked him why he'd done it, he said the painting reminded him of his mother. And I would love that to be true, but I have to be honest with you, because that's how we do things here.

I could not stand that fact up anywhere solid. But it does turn up in the retellings, but I couldn't find like a news, even a newspaper report at the time really saying it. So it is with a big asterisk.

Lovely, if true. Filed under probably too good to be. Yeah, fair.

Either way, two down. Drilling a hole in the door, then a bloke on a bike. And the gallery still hasn't put the tripwires on the bloody paintings.

Fuck's sake. I swear to God, some people, it's just like you've got more money than cents. Just, just.

Just kind of get a grip. What are you doing? Okay, so 1981. Theft number three.

And arguably, this is kind of the big one. Okay. This is the one that reads like someone pitched it as a film and got told to tone it down because no one would believe it.

Settle in. Oh, okay, right. The 14th of August, 1981.

Middle of the day. And two men come into the gallery separately so as to not look like they're together. It's a quiet morning.

They've only been a handful of visitors. One of the men goes up to the desk and starts chatting to the attendant. Really engaging with them.

Asking about the children's quiz sheet. The sort of thing a normal, slightly boring visitor might ask about. Proper, lovely day, isn't it? And what's this little activity sheet for the kids all about then? Kind of energy.

And while that's happening, while the attendant's attention is on the first man, the second man slips around the back of the desk. Okay. And the attendant hears him and gets startled.

And the man covers it very quickly by asking a question. He asks the price of the catalogue. Okay.

And he's told it's 35 pounds. And he says, can I pay in dollars? The attendant says, yeah, that's fine. And the man says, brilliant.

I'll just pop out to the car and get the dollars. And off he goes. And a moment later, the first man walks away too.

And they don't come back. And after a bit, the penny drops and someone goes and checks the walls. The Jacob is gone.

Third time. There's an alarm button behind the desk that rings straight through to East Dulwich Police Station. And they press it and the police come.

But the men are long gone. And so is the Rembrandt. Okay.

And for 10 days, nothing. And then the gallery's director gets a phone call. Now, the director at this point is a man called Giles Waterfield.

Of course he's called Giles Waterfield. And I want you to keep him in mind because this poor man is about to have the strangest fortnight in his professional career. Okay.

He picks up the phone and there is a man on the other end with a German accent who introduces himself as Mr. Mulya. Okay. And Mr. Mulya says that he's a businessman.

An honest man, he says. And he stresses that. He only wants to help.

But he's been approached, he says, by an American collector who is very keen to buy this Rembrandt. And Waterfield says, well, it's not for sale and it's been stolen. And the businessman says, yes, I know.

But I can get it back for you. For a fee. Let's say a hundred thousand pounds.

Call it 10% of what the painting's worth and I'll return it. So, that's the ransom dressed up in a nice suit. And the businessman wants Waterfield to fly to Amsterdam to discuss it.

And crucially, he tells him not to involve the police. Of course. Which obviously is the first thing Waterfield does.

Of course. Good man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the police essentially go, right, we'll just let this one play out. And what follows is one of the great amateur hour undercover operations with a mild-mannered art gallery director as its reluctant lead. Okay.

I'm going to give you the highlights because there is a lot of them. Okay. Waterfield, to prove that Mulya was the real deal, insists on evidence that he's actually got the painting.

Okay. So, he asks for details of what's written on the back of it and photographs of it. Okay.

And the businessman delivers. The photographs, when they come, show the little Rembrandt propped up against a wash basin at the top of a flight of stairs, somewhere like a toothbrush. Okay.

And to collect these photographs, Waterfield is sent by Mulya to the Playboy Club. Okay. The actual Playboy Club on Park Lane.

He's told to go to the door, find a doorman named Danny, and ask for the envelope for Leo. Okay. So, he goes.

Except Danny's on holiday. So, Waterfield has to stand at the door of the Playboy Club asking a stand-in doorman he's never met for the envelope for Leo, like the world's most nervous spy. And the new doorman just does it.

He hands over this envelope and off Waterfield goes. And the doorman's like, what? These poems be weird. It escalates from there.

At one point, Waterfield's little flat indulge is, and I'm quoting the man who wrote this up at the time, packed with nine large policemen. At another point, they need a location for the handover, somewhere to lure the businessman. And the cosy, safe meeting place that they land on is the back office of the Dulwich Village branch of Barclays Bank.

Okay. So, you've got the bank manager in his cramped little office with a gallery director and an international ransom negotiation happening in there while the normal customers are outside paying in their cheques. And they're a plainclothes.

There are plainclothes officers hiding in the bushes of the churchyard garden next door, who then get spotted and rumbled by a bloke from the college who's just wandering past. You don't in the bush? Why are you in the bush? Why are you hiding in a bush? Why are you in the bush? Shut up. Don't even tell them I'm in the bush.

And it even turns out that Mulya is planning to double-cross his own team anyway. He asks Barclays to knock him up a forged document, a fake letter from a fake American collector offering a million dollars so that he can weave it at his associates. What? So, he asks Barclays when he gets there to knock him up a forged document, some kind of fake letter from the American collector that there's meant to be this collector, right? Offering a million dollars for the painting.

Right. So, basically, Mulya wants to be able to show it to his associates and be like, look, we got usurped, kind of thing, by the American. Right.

Okay. The bank manager, to his credit, does say no. Yeah.

Says that the bank can't go about forging documents and rather, kind of... He just, he's like, I'm a bank manager, this is Barclays. I ain't gonna forge you documents for you to show to your criminal enterprise to be like, well, I'm sorry, no. Oh my God.

Like I said, in the end, the trap actually does work. Police have been following the chain of people around Mulya as well. There's a man called Ekterhoft.

Okay. Ekterhoft. Okay.

Who's tracked over from Amsterdam. A man called Stollard, who provided a flat to stash the painting in. And they watched the two of them leave the flat, get into a taxi, stop and buy a large briefcase.

A briefcase conspicuously big enough to hold a painting the size of Jacob. And then drive off. And in Barclays Square, the police actually box off that taxi.

Right. With unmarked cars all around it. So there's nowhere to go.

And they open the briefcase and there it is. Right. There's the takeaway Rembrandt going for a ride around Mayfair in a brand new briefcase.

He's just having a jolly. Leave him alone. At the Old Bailey afterwards, the sentences came down like this.

The man who actually took it was named Williams. And he got three years. Stollard, who provided the flat, got one.

Eckerhoff, who the write up at the time calls the dangerous Mr. Eckerhoff. OK. He got four years.

And Muller? Well, Mr. Muller, the mastermind, the man with the German accent and the Playboy Club and the washbasin photos. He sat in Brixton on Rembrandt for about seven months, waiting for trial. And then he was acquitted.

He walked away. The most memorable villain of the lot. And he's the one who got cleaned through the front door.

How? That's mental. This is insane. So that's that's three thefts now.

And I'll give the gallery this. After 1981, they finally spent some money. Good.

About $15,000, the reports say, on a proper security upgrade. Tripwires, better fixings, the lot. 15 years and three thefts after a professional art thief stood in their gallery and told them exactly what to do.

Better late than never. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except... Oh, no.

1983, two years after the upgrade. And this one finally is the proper Hollywood heist. Right.

If the others were a drill, a bicycle and a man asking to pay in dollars, this one is the abseiling through the ceiling one. Right. OK, fine.

It's the small hours of the morning around 1 a.m. at the end of May. And this time they go over the top, literally. The gallery's got these kind of beautiful big skylights in the roof.

It was designed to be lit by natural light from above. And the thieves get ladders up the outside of the building and onto the roof. OK.

They smash through one of the skylights and then they drop a second ladder down through the hole into the gallery and climb down inside. In through the roof, like something out of a caper film. Now, the new security actually did something this time.

OK. The painting was fixed to the wall much more firmly than before. But if you've come down through the roof on two ladders, you've come prepared.

And they'd brought a crowbar. So they just levered it off the wall, frame and all. And this time that's what they took.

Just the Jacob in and out. OK. The alarm did go off.

The upgrade did work that far. And the police response was genuinely quite fast. They were there within three minutes, according to some reports.

But three minutes wasn't quick enough. The thieves were already up the ladder, out through the roof and gone, leaving both ladders behind them propped up like a calling card. Yeah.

Poor Giles. Poor Giles Waterfield, our man from the last saga, later described the moment he was told. And the line that he remembered was an officer saying to him, quote, we have some bad news, sir.

The Rembrandt's gone again. But this time it really was gone. Oh.

Not for days, not for weeks, but for years. The Jacob vanished completely and stayed vanished for over three years. And then in the back end of 1986, a tip off came in and the painting turns up.

Not in London, not in a churchyard or a bush, but in Germany, in the left luggage office of a railway station in a town called Munster. Oh. Just sitting there, tricked him, wrapped in brown paper, like a suitcase someone forgot to collect.

Recovered, checked over, completely unharmed. Wow. And when it came home, Waterfield, honestly, who could blame him at this point, said what everyone must have been thinking.

He said the temptation to just lock the wretched thing away and hang up a colour photograph of it instead was very high. Oh, bless him. Put a picture of the picture on the wall and keep the real one in a bloody vault forever.

Yep. And for a few weeks, that's more or less what happened. And then he changed his mind and they hung it back up because it's a Rembrandt.

And a Rembrandt is meant to be looked at. Even this one. Even after all of that.

Yeah. And that, 1983, in through the roof, out through the roof, three years in a German locker. That's the fourth and so far, the final theft.

Okay. Four times. 1966, 1973, 1981 and 1983.

A drill, a bike, a briefcase, then a crowbar through the ceiling. Four times stolen, four times recovered. Every single time it came home.

And that's what put it in the Guinness Book of Records. Not the most valuable painting ever stolen, not the most famous, but the most stolen. The one thieves simply cannot leave alone for some reason, but can also never ever seem to keep.

Exactly. And that's kind of the joke at the centre of this really. And it's the thing that ties it to where we're kind of going next.

Because why can't they keep hold of it? Yeah. Either the gallery or the thief. It's not the alarms.

The alarms have failed for years. It's that it's a Rembrandt and that's one of the most recognisable objects on earth. Yeah, yeah.

The second you've got it, you're holding something you can never sell. You can never show it to anyone, never do anything with it really. Because everyone who matters knows exactly what it is and exactly where it belongs.

Yeah. It's too hot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is in the most literal sense, priceless by this point, which turns out to mean worthless to the one person who's got it stuffed in a briefcase. Yeah, it's true. All that effort for a thing you have to abandon under a bush.

It does seem mental. Which kind of brings me, believe it or not, to a bronze. Okay.

So we're doing a bit of a side quest. All right. On the ones that didn't come home.

Okay. So the takeaway, Rembrandt always comes back. Every time.

It's almost a comfort. This daft little painting keeps getting nicked and keeps boomerang, boomeranging itself back. But I don't want to leave you with the warm and fuzzy version.

Because just up the road from the gallery, at almost exactly the same time we're laughing about spray canisters and getaway bicycles, South London lost two beautiful things for real. And they tell you the flip side of everything we've just said about what stolen art is actually worth. So a five minute walk from Dulwich Picture Gallery is Dulwich Park.

And for over 40 years, since 1970, there's been a sculpture in that park by Barbara Hepworth, one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century, which is easy for you to say. A big bronze called Two Forms Divided Circle. It stands by the lake and has done for decades.

It's a local landmark. The kind of thing you grow up walking past. It's just always there.

It's part of the furniture of the place. And in December 2011, somebody cuts it off its plinth and takes it. That's the horrible bit.

That Hepworth was insured for half a million pounds. But nobody stole it to sell it as a Hepworth because exactly like the Rembrandt, you can't. It's too famous.

So the belief almost certainly is that it was taken purely for the metal. Oh, my God. Melted down for scrap by people who'd have got a few hundred quid for it tops.

A world-class work of art worth half a million pounds turned into a few hundred pounds of liquid metal. It has obviously never been recovered. It's completely gone.

Bloody hell. And it wasn't a one-off. This was during a proper epidemic of metal theft across London.

People were stripping lead off roofs, cable off of railways, plaques off war memorials, anything that they could weigh in. And the month before the Hepworth, they'd taken another one over in Bermondsey, which is a statue of a man called Dr. Alfred Salter. And I want to tell you who he was quickly, because this is one of those ones where it gets you.

Alfred Salter was a doctor in Bermondsey back when Bermondsey was one of the poorest, most disease-ridden slums in London. And he offered the poor free medical care, which at the time was a genuinely radical thing to do. And it cost him.

He and his wife Ada, who was a force of nature in her own right, and one of the first female mayors in the country, they chose to go on living among the people they were helping. They lived in the slums rather than move somewhere clean and safe. And they paid the worst possible price for it.

Their only child, a little girl called Joyce, caught scarlet fever, an illness that spread through exactly those slum conditions that they were fighting against. And she died when she was only eight years old. And there was a sculpture down on the riverside at Bermondsey of that family.

It was called Dr. Salter's Daydream. It showed Alfred as an old man sitting on a bench, looking across at his little girl, Joyce and the family cat, remembering her. An old man daydreaming about his dead daughter.

And in 2011, the scrap metal thieves took him, took the statue of Alfred right off of the bench and near enough certainly melted him down too. It's just horrible. The local community would not let it lie.

They raised money, £60,000 of it, which was then matched by the council. And they didn't just replace what was stolen. The original sculptor came back, recast Alfred.

And while they were at it, they added someone who'd never been there. They added Ada, his wife. The campaigner, the mayor.

And when the new group went up in 2014, and then the Ada Salter became, as far as anyone can tell, the first statue of a female politician in London. Oh wow, that's really cool. So they took a grieving father off a bench for the price of the metal.

And the neighbourhood answered by putting him back and giving him his wife beside him. That one came home too, just kind of a bit of a longer way round with a bit added. Yeah, exactly.

So there you go. The most stolen painting in the world, sitting on a wall in South London this whole time. Four thefts, a drill, a bicycle, a briefcase and a crowbar.

A man who robbed a gallery and then came back to give security advice. A ransom negotiation run out of the back of Barclays. And a little Rembrandt that's been under a bush on Streatham Common, in a taxi around Barclays Square and in left luggage locker in Germany.

And has always, always come home. You can go and see it, by the way. It's still there.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, England's oldest public art gallery. And it's lovely. And the little fella with the moustache is on the wall where he belongs.

Behind one assumes quite a lot of better security than he is used to. Go and say hello to the most stolen face in the world. Just don't put him in a bloody briefcase.

I'm so happy you did that one. It makes me very happy. Oh, thank you so much.

I mean, I could have probably got into a lot more kind of crimey detail. Yeah, which maybe some of the Trevor's going to feel shortchanged. But I did think it was quite nice to have a bit of a jaunt.

Yes. Through. Yeah, there are victims.

Yeah. But it's, it's not quite what we're usually dabbling in. It's very white collar victim stuff.

And he comes back. He comes back. Exactly.

He comes home. But it has always baffled me. And I'm glad that you covered it.

But like the I've never understood why anyone would steal art. Well, there is black markets for some of it. Yeah.

Like not necessarily. Yeah. I don't know.

It just feels mad. Like, why would you, you know? Sorry, I've got hiccups now. I know that Jacob might not be.

Well, he's he's bloody famous now because he's been stolen four times. But like, he may not have been like, he's not Rango's sunflower or whatever. But at the same time.

It's still a Rembrandt. It's a Rembrandt. And where are you going to chip that off to? Like what? I think that's the disconnect.

So I think it's like there have been quote unquote professionals stealing him. But. Not like the demand isn't there.

So like, you know, like Monet's and and Picasso's. They get stolen to order. It's a huge heist.

Because there is a huge black market calling for it. There just doesn't seem to be the demand for this. No.

This little painting. They're kind of stealing him because he's very, very valuable. But then got nowhere.

They haven't got the connections to that dark. Yeah, I would. I would also be fascinated to find out if the other one of his mate has ever been tried.

They just steal him. I also don't understand why have they not been put together? Why aren't they back together? That does seem very... I wonder if it's the... Was it in Germany or Amsterdam? I can't remember where he is now. Sorry, I've literally closed my laptop now.

That's fine, yeah, yeah. Google it. But I wonder if it's that gallery doesn't want to give him up.

Yeah, maybe. And Dulwich doesn't want to give him up. To be fair, I feel like Dulwich has been through quite a bit.

Maybe the other gallery's like, we're not giving you another one, Dulwich. Are you fucking insane? Or they've gone, no, we don't want... You approve it, you can't have nice things. Or we don't want the fucking hassle, you keep him.

Oh, mate. Do you know what? I find it quite interesting. I don't think I've ever been to Dulwich Picture Gallery.

I've been past it. I've been past... I know where it is. I just don't think I've ever been in.

Should we go? I mean, should we go and look at him? We'll go and have a look. We'll take a photo. Hey, we found him.

Well, we've got to be careful because they might then be like, what are these guys hanging around this tiny painting? Um, also love the fact that I think they would still call us girls. What are these girls? Look at those tiny newborn children. Look at those incredibly young, incredibly young, beautiful, beautiful, small girls.

What are they doing? Just hanging around Jacob. They're so young to be interested in art. Why are they so young? I don't fear for the next generation any longer.

They're just incredibly... Young. Young girls. Girls are really into the art.

No, you know, notoriously, I am shit at art. So I would go and go, oh, that's nice. Should we go to Pizza Express? That's the only other bit I know.

Or go on one of those ridiculous bikes that they have around Dulwich Park. Are they banana bikes? The ones where you basically... What are you talking about? So they have a little, round the lake in Dulwich Park. You're having your weird dreams again.

And the bikes go upside down. No, Rach, you were asleep. No, no, this is genuinely real.

In Dulwich Park, around the lake, you can get like, they're little pedal bikes, but you're basically like almost lying down. You have to pedal like that. This isn't a visual medium.

It's also hilarious because the laptop's in the way of your body. So I actually only got the head and legs of that. But yeah, you can do like, where you lay down and you've got like to pedal and you have to... Shall I take a little video? I mean, you just, oh God.

Okay, here we go. Are you ready? No, I can't open my camera because I'm so young. You're so young, you don't know how to do it.

Ready? So yeah, like... You lay down, you pedal like that. Oh God. Yeah, okay, we'll put that one up.

That's fine. Your legs look banging. My legs do look good, that's fine.

We're happy with that. Send it to you now. But yeah, no, that's what I would do.

Go and play with the little pedalo things. I send that to my mum. I love this.

So welcome home, mum. No context. Oh God.

Do you know what though? It's genuinely been very nice to do a case where it's not, let's have a deeper meaningful about something that we can't really control and it's actually desperately sad. We can just laugh at idiots being idiots. Right, Travis, you'll understand in about a month.

Yeah. We got some heavy shit coming. Yeah.

And I just needed a little light relief. A nice little bit of levity. I do not blame you whatsoever.

I must admit it was quite funny when after last week's episode, the Vikings, then we saw that there were a couple of people who commented being like, oh, After Dark's new episode is about Vikings. I was like, well, do you know what? Honestly, because we now know that you're listening, Anthony and Maddie, if you would like some additional suggestions, like you can just message me. I have given you where you can contact us in all the nice bits.

So if you'd like to do that, please feel free. There's no judgement. Sometimes you're insufferable.

More than happy to help out a fellow historian. Delete this recording. I'm going to do a sad one.

Absolutely not, shan't. Quickly looking at the list of some dead kids. Come on.

I don't want dead kids. Can't do it. Rachel's too happy.

I'm too happy. Quickly, quickly, bring it down. To be fair, I am going to bring it down next week.

So yeah, leave you with a nice sunny one. We should have done it the other way around. Yeah, we really should.

I had a two week break with something a bit more jovial, pleasant. Never mind. Anyway, there you go, Trevor.

Thank you so much for listening. If you, I've completely lost my train of thought, because I hiccuped. If you're still listening after this chaos.

No, I'm going to do that bit again. Oh, thank you very much, as per usual. You're very welcome.

Very well researched. And yes, very enjoyable. And I'm very glad it's come off the list.

I've been asking you to do it for ages. So thank you. Stop moaning at me now.

All right, I will. OK, just for a little bit. I can't promise for long, but just for a little bit.

And on that note, Trevor, thank you very, very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed the episode. If you would like, please do go and tell someone else about us and leave a nice five star review, just because that helps the algorithm show us to more people.

And we'd really like to have a few more, Trevor. Indeedy. Otherwise, I think that's your lot.

It is. So enjoy. Happy Wednesday.

And we shall see you next week. We will have a great week. Look after yourselves and each other.

See you later. See you later. Good luck.

Goodbye. Good luck. OK, now.

Love you. Bye.